The information processing terminal such as mobile phone, personal digital assistant (PDA) or the like can be connected to a network for sending and receiving an electronic mail (e-mail), and also to the so-called Internet. Also, the mobile phone and PDA have become amazingly prevalent, and there has become more popular the sending and reception of an e-mail by direct communications between the information processing terminals than that by the conventional communications, namely, indirect communications, between stationary personal computers (PC) via the Internet.
Along with the diversification of the electronic mail, various manners of e-mail sending and reception have been proposed. Normally, an e-mail is sent or received simply by clicking the ‘Send and Receive’ button. As one of such various e-mail sending and receiving manners, there is already available, for example, software which is to be used in the apparatus to display a virtual world in which a character such as a fictional pet or the like appearing on the screen of the apparatus carries a mail from or to the user in order to alarm the user of the e-mail sending or reception. This software provides such a function that the user can communicate with the pet or can occasionally receive a message from the pet.
Also, other manners of e-mail sending and reception are available. For example, simple “pictures” are provided which can be depicted with combinations of symbols to make text data that reflects user's emotion as much as possible. Further, pictographic characters are provided which are represented by special codes which are effective only between apparatuses suitable for exclusive use. Since these manners of e-mail sending and reception need not any dedicated software, they are simplest to use and are widely accepted.
Although an e-mail can be accompanied by video data and audio data, it is basically expressed with text data and thus is limited in incorporating “mood” and “user's sentiment” in a sentence.
On the other hand, there have been proposed techniques to control an apparatus in response to an internal state, such as emotion, of the apparatus user or the like. The conventional techniques are different from the e-mail sending and receiving method. For example, the Japanese Patent Application Laid Open No. 2001-34410 (Patent Document No. 1) has proposed a technique for safe handling of an apparatus, with which a sensor provided at an interface of the apparatus, such as a so-called mouse of a PC, joystick of an airplane or control stick of a crane vehicle, through which the user (pilot or operator) makes input of an intended operation to the apparatus, is used to detect a phenomenon of the user or operator, such as “unconscious straining”, “cliff-hanging” or the like and estimate the emotion or sensitiveness of the user, pilot or operator, such as upsurge of sentiment, on the basis of the detected phenomenon for the purpose of safe handling of the apparatus.
Taking the electronic mail (e-mail) as an example, however, communication with a software-controlled character or mail from the character will not be in dialogue form in many cases because the response from the character is just a selected one of, for example, formulaic expressions or keywords prepared in advance. Also, a response can only be made in a predetermined pattern, and hence the e-mail is still limited in making an expression corresponding to “mood” or “user's sentiment”.
Also, with the technique disclosed in the above Patent Document No. 1, the emotion or sensitiveness of the operator is detected. However, the detected operator's emotion or sensitiveness is fed back to the control of the apparatus being operated by the user, but not used as any communication tool responsive to the operator's emotion or sensitiveness.